Electronic displays, particularly those found on portable devices such as mobile telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and the like, tend to have a resolution significantly lower than a resolution found with printed matter of the same size. The contrast of electronic displays moreover usually is inferior to the contrast of printed matter. These factors result in it being more difficult for users to obtain information from electronic displays, compared to printed material. There are ongoing efforts to improve displays. There are ongoing efforts also to provide information for display such that it can more easily be interpreted or reviewed by a user.
Non-textual content of most importance to users typically is faces of people in photographic images.
EP 1 589 478 discloses a digital camera operable to detect a face in a captured image, to place the face within a rectangle having corners defined by the face detection algorithm, and to magnify the image within the rectangle for display. This allows a user to see in close-up the faces of subjects in a captured scene.
Thumbnailing is a well-known technique for producing small, ‘thumbnail’ images such that a large number can be displayed together in a relatively small area. Usually, a thumbnail serves as a selectable link to a higher resolution version of the thumbnail image, or else the thumbnail acts as a selectable link to a collection of content items. Thumbnails can be displayed in a matrix or list so as to provide access to associated content or other information. This is particularly useful when the thumbnails include faces since users usually are able to recognise faces more quickly than they are able to read names.
Thumbnails are created by scaling the original image. Thumbnails can be created on the basis of only a part of the original image, although in this case user input is required.
The invention was made in this context.